One of the largest strike-slip quakes ever recorded on land. It ran straight beneath the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline — engineered to slide with the fault, and it did, without spilling a drop.
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DownloadThe 2002 Denali earthquake struck on November 3, 2002, registering magnitude 7.9 (moment magnitude, Mw). Each whole step on the moment-magnitude scale is roughly 32 times more energy, so this released on the order of 708× the energy of a magnitude 6.0 earthquake.
Its epicenter was located near 63.51°N, 147.45°W, at a depth of about 4 km — a shallow crustal earthquake. Shallow earthquakes like this release their energy close to the surface, which is why the shaking near the epicenter was so violent.